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The Firewood Project/Transcript
WORK IN PROGRESS; NEEDS HUMAN REVIEW [ horns honking ] [ jazz music plays ] [ geese honking ] [ ducks quacking ] [ moose grunts ] [ water splashes ] well, we got a great show for you this time. We're gonna show you how to turn a furnace into a popcorn maker to insulate your house. I'm gonna be splitting some logs, I'll get rid of my valuables off the bench, dougie franklin will be along with a few words of -- well, just words, and bill and I are going into the woods for a big surprise. And now, here's the ricardo montalban of sock hunting, my uncle red green! Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. And now, here's the hervé villechaize of basketball, my nephew harold. [ tires screech, engine roars ] thank you. Odd thing happened to junior singleton this week. A couple from the city came right up to his front door, offered him 200 bucks for his wood pile. Ha ha! That wood pile is covered in ants. What would they want that thing for? Junior didn't ask, harold. Once he heard "200 bucks," that pretty much ended the discussion. He just grabbed the money and started throwing the wood into the car, which wasn't all that easy. They had two phones in there. Why would you have two phones in your car, harold? Well, one might be a fax line. Of course, you know, he might have two lines in one phone. You know, that way, you could talk to two people at one time. Yeah. Oh, you know what else? If you had that call-waiting, four people at one time. Wa-a-a! Oh, conference calling -- conference calling. If he had that, he could hook up everybody all together at one time. Huh-huh huh-huh! So if you have two phones, you don't need any friends, right? Basically, yes. You should look into that yourself, harold. I was wondering about city people buying firewood. But apparently now with a lot of these condos, they have a fireplace in the living room or the dining room or even the bedroom. There's a sad commentary, when you got to heat up your bedroom by sticking something in the wall. Uncle red, these are majorly successful people. We're talking about movers and shakers here. Well, we have movers and shakers at the lodge. No. No. They're more like waddlers and twitchers. I'm talking about people with money -- people we should have here at the lodge. No, wait a minute, harold. All we want to do is sell them every stick of firewood we can get our hands on. We want their money, not their company. It's no wonder the tourist industry's dying a death around here. That's the way I like it. If you get tourists and sightseers, you got to have sights for them to see, and the next thing you know, you're talking quaint, and you know how I feel about quaint. I'd rather just rake in as much money as we can, and that's what we're gonna do with this firewood thing. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, then, there won't be any trees left. Who cares? We'll have enough money to buy more. [ engine revving ] uh, excuse me, but, uh, would the owner of a 1964 pontiac strato-chief just, uh, come and get me when he wants to leave. I just got to get my monster truck down off it. [ engine roars ] ♪ trapper jack was hunting bear ♪ ♪ a dangerous hobby at best ♪ ♪ they brought him back to the doctor in town ♪ ♪ and he was a heck of a mess ♪ ♪ there was some assembly required ♪ ♪ mostly teeth and bones and hair ♪ ♪ jack had always been good with a knife ♪ ♪ but, unfortunately, not quite as good as the bear ♪ ha ha. [ ducks quacking ] well, you're gonna end up on the couch this time. Yeah. She's taking a night course -- making crafts. Created a dried-flower arrangement. Hung it on the wall, and you said, "well, that looks silly." the three words you should never say to the woman you love for any reason. Don't ever say something looks silly to a woman -- ever. Now, I'm sure it's a bunch of dried weeds, and flowers, and sticks painted gold, jammed into a hunk of green foam. Something you'd sweep off the laneway. But you went and you called it "silly," and now we're gonna help bail you out. Now, you tell her you've got an optometrist appointment. You come home an hour later acting like you got new glasses. You make a special point of looking at her dried-kindling thingy again. You say something like, "oh, I see it now. "what was I thinking? I like that. "yeah, I really like the way "the big things are crushing the little things there, "and is that the real ragweed on that? "by golly, that is -- that is an attractive unit there. "what say we take down the picture of the dogs playing poker and pop that baby up there?" you -- you don't want to go overboard, though. It makes her suspicious. No. No. That's right. That's right. And, actually, maybe give it a little bit of time. She'll start building something. Maybe it'll be half decent, you know? Or she may give it up altogether, go back to playing bingo, and make some money. Either way, you win. Just give it a little time. Yeah, never say that anything she does is silly. No. Otherwise, she might mention that spice rack you built her. Or that new fishing hat. Or that silly lodge you joined. Well, this week, with the guys all out there cutting down trees and chopping them up into firewood, I thought I'd take the "handyman corner" and teach you all how to split logs. Okay, first thing you want to do is stand the log up straight on a flat surface there. And -- of course, you want to clear all the stuff out of the way that's around the thing. Oh, yeah. You take a full swing with a ax and come down on something like a vise, and the hair will stand up so far on the back of your neck, you can card wool on it. All right. We're all set to go here. [ whoosh! ] all right, now, you always want to make sure the area behind you is cleared out, as well. Yep. We're fine. Ready... And... [ creak! ] all right. Uh, let's try that again. Okay. [ creak! ] oh. [ creak! ] all right. [ creak! ] [ creak! ] oh. So, that's the way you want to play it, huh? Ah. [ whistling ] [ creak! ] there's actually a safer and, uh, more upscale way to split firewood, and that is to take something here, which is called a wedge, from the latin word "wedgie," which means, "to split or rent asunder." so, you just get that started into the log. [ bone cracks ] all right, uh, what's happened there is that somehow my thumb managed to get in between the hammer and the wedge, which is actually not a good place for a thumb to be. But one of the signs of a true handyman is his ability to control his temper. Right now, I'm feeling pretty darn proud of myself. [ crash ] mind you, there's always room for improvement. Coming up, we got bill out in the woods, making some kind of trouble... And ranger gord's got a brand-new game. Well, operation firewood is off to a flying start. Got all the axes sharpened up. And we're going through chain-saw gas like the recession's over. Well, I hope you're being respectful of the environment and cutting down trees that only need to be removed due to disease and death and the proper thinning of a forest. Well, we're using the 100-to-1 ratio, harold. For every 100 oak trees, we only cut down one. I only wish I had 100 nephews. Well, let's not forget our safety precautions, uncle red -- steel-toed boots, protective eyewear, and tying off the trees so they fall correctly. Too much work, harold. The trees don't grow over 60 feet tall, so we stand 70 feet apart. That way, every man gets his own tree. You don't have some goof coming in at the last minute and finishing her off when you did all the work to get her that close. Well, how many trees do you plan to assault? 50 a day, every day, day after day, until we're too tired to do anymore. Wow, that'll give you a grand total of... 50. You rolling there, harold? All right, we're here with our friend ranger gord. Hi, red. Hi, harold. Yeah, hi, there, gord. Uh, gord, we're getting kind of bogged down with the firewood project there. I wonder if you could do us a favor. Go out into the woods and make a little "x" on all the trees that are easy to cut down. Would you do that? Well, that sounds like you need to know more about the flora. Oh, no, no. I know flora. Everybody knows flora. Right, gord? [ laughs loudly ] no, I mean the flora in the woods. And you can learn all about the flora in the woods by playing this new game I invented. It's called "grabitat." you get it? You get it? "grabitat," because you reach in and you grab something from your habitat. I don't want to play some dumb game, gord. I want to go cut down trees. Play one game, and I'll mark 10 trees for you. Deal. Grabitat is fun. You just reach in, and you pull something out. And if you can identify it, it's worth five points. Okay. That's pine. Five points for me. Your turn, red. All right. Let's see what we got in here. There we go. [ chuckling ] it's, uh -- I guess that would be a stick, right? That's a dogwood. What's so funny about dogwood? Smell it. [ sniffs ] [ coughing ] [ laughs ] oh, that's funny! You know, because you want your game to be funny if you want it to be popular. Uh-huh. You know, I think this is gonna be a great hit with the kids because they can learn all about the environment. I'm gonna sell it all those stores that sell earth shoes. Okay. One minute. That's sumac. Five points for me. Your turn, red. No problem! Oh. Ha ha ha ha ha. I know this one. That's mint. [ sniffing ] no, it's not. No, it's not mint. Well, I've seen that leaf before. [ chuckling ] all right. You got me. What is it? Poison ivy. [ laughs ] this is the home-renovation feature, where we show you how to make your house more homey. And, uh, this here, of course, is mike. Mike helps us out with these parts of the show. Well, mr. Green -- he sure helped me out. He just saved my life, is all. Now, mike is with, you know, one of the prisoner-rehab-deal things. This man is a saint. That's all I'm gonna say about it. Okay. Uh, we're gonna show you a great way to insulate your home. Yeah, that's it, mike. Now, you hear about vermiculite and the foam and the fiberglass and so on. Uh, what we like is the industrial-grade popcorn, and it's got a high r-factor, you know? Low in cholesterol. Absolutely right. And all you have to do is use the heating system in your house to blow -- no, no, no, no, no -- to blow this stuff up into the exterior walls. So, the first step is to take the end panel off your furnace. Yeah. Here. I'll show you how it's done. Oh. Done. See, I'm learning, eh? You know, I-I said -- I said the end panel here, mike. Oh. I can't believe it. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, it's all right. It's all right. I don't know how I'll get this back on. No problem. Don't worry about it. Now, what you want to do here is to turn your furnace into a hot-air popcorn popper, you've got to take a wad of the handyman's secret weapon, duct tape, and you want to just ball that up around the fan belt there so that when she gets going, she'll vibrate up on you. And that way, the kernels won't burn too bad in the heating chamber. I'll get it. Yeah? No, no. It's sticky. You all right? Yeah. It keeps sticking to itself. Yeah. Maybe we'll just use some rope. Here. You pull on it. Yeah. All right. Okay. Why don't I come through this way? I think if you came around the other way... All right. All right. All right. You're right, you're right. You got it. There we are. Oh, this -- this is working against me somehow. [ grunting ] how much duct tape have we got? Two more ducks. [ engine roars ] this will all make sense at a later date, I promise. [ engine roars ] all right, now, the popcorn's gonna come up through all the floor vents, so you want to take the covers off of all of them. [ gunshot ] mike: That's all of them. Oh, sorry. Oh, geez. You okay? Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine, mike. All right, now, what you want to do is cut a hole in the wall about eight inches above the floor and line these two right up so that the popcorn can continue right on up and go up and fill up your exterior wall. So, what you need is a little bit of temporary ductwork. And you know what you can use is a boot box like this. Cut the ends out of it, and then it's long enough to join up the two holes. You said cut the ends off. Yeah. I cut the sides off there. Yeah, that's, uh -- yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of short. Yeah. [ exhales sharply ] I'm useless. Well... Useless. Well, uh, uh, we'll -- we'll come back a little later in the show, we'll get her all rigged up. You're all right. You're all right. I'm useless! [ explosion ] red: Time for "adventures with bill." out in the woods. Where else? Where are you bill? Where are you? Well, he's around somewhere. Yeah, there he is. Wow. Look at all those axes. With the "pick your own firewood" project and so on, bill, uh, decided he was gonna kind of show us how to do things and cut stuff up and -- oh! And, I guess, how to throw an ax from one end of the woods to the other. Okay, bill, we've seen that. Do you have the other axes? Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah. Bill doesn't get a lot done in a day, I guess, when he's working in the lumbering -- he's kind of a lumbering guy. You'd think that he -- well, anyway, you got the other ax? [ thud ] ohh! Uh, bill, what about the other axes? Yeah, good idea. Good idea, bill. So, we got the other axes. Oh, out we go, and, uh, I wonder where the other one went, anyway. Who knows? Oh, there it is. There it is. Oh, that's handy. Now, the thing about doing work like cutting up logs and everything -- you got to make it fun -- that's the trick of it. Bill -- now, you got to -- you know, in -- there we go. And you turn it into a sport. I think it was mary poppins who said, you know, "just a spoonful of swinging an ax makes your leg go down," or something like that -- I forget. You know, and rather than just chop up the log -- get right up -- get -- oh, oh, oh -- yeah. Get right up there on top of it, you know, and just -- and you can sing one of those lumberjack tunes and just kind of get some of the real -- boy, that is big fun. Ohh. All right. Some parts of it maybe aren't as enjoyable as -- as some of the others. I'm sure he's fine. Apparently, you don't need all your toes. And bill starts cutting that up, and, you know, I'll tell you, it's good for you. You'd get in terrific condition, I would think, if you did this on a regular basis. 'cause we're hacking away. We're having a good time. We're feeling good. I don't think we've had this much fun in the woods, uh, since the fire. There we go. There we go. There's -- there's the secret. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's progress. And bill cuts it right down there, and I didn't feel good about cutting her all the way through because it was his own chain saw. So he thought what he'd do is just finish her off with an ax -- kind of a purist, bill is. But unfortunately, she wedged -- wedged right in there. Can't get her out. Now what'll we do? We're running short on axes here. So bill's got an idea. He figures if we each get on each end of the log and start bouncing, you know, with the weight and so on, we'll be able to spring that ax right out of there. It didn't sound like that would work to me. But I didn't feel like thinking of anything else, so away we go, and it certainly spread -- oh, yeah, there we go. It's working. What about the ax, though? Did the ax come out? Yes, it did. There we go. Coming up, we got winston rothschild, king of the hosers. And, don't worry, we got the popcorn-insulation project totally under control. Well, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to turn trees into firewood. Our window of opportunity is closing fast. Carpe diem, uncle red. What? Carpe...Diem. Seize the day. You're close, harold. I seized the chain saw. I think we're going at this all wrong. I think the profit is in selling the raw materials, not in marking up the labor costs. Whoo-hoo! Whoo! I've never heard you speak in business terms before. Well, we don't have a business relationship, harold. With you, it's personal. I know. So I'm going to plan "b." harold, tell me this. What do people from the city like to do most? Uh, drive silver-colored german cars? No. I know this one. It's, uh, uh, pay too much money for clothes. Ha ha. No! I know what it is! I know what it is! It's buy mutual funds. Ha ha! Okay, I don't know. Pick your own strawberries, harold. No, no. No. Harold. Harold. That's what people from the city like to do. Pick strawberries? Not the strawberries -- the picking. They like coming up here and pretending they're farmers. Pick your own peaches, pick your own apples. Why not pick your own firewood? You got to give them a pretty big basket. No, no, no. You just take the 300 bucks, hand them an ax, get them to sign an injury waiver, and point them at a tree. There's a lot of people going home without firewood -- or fingers. I don't think that matters, harold. I think some of these guys would pay 300 bucks just to whale away at a pine for an hour. They don't get a chance to commune with nature, stuck up there in the glass tower, behind a steel desk, playing with the plastic computer there. So what you're selling, then, is stress relief. That's right. Where else can you buy therapy by the cord? [ whirring, rattling ] if my daughter is watching this show... Your mother and I would like you to come back. Did you know you took my credit card? [ sawing ] okay, we're back with this week's home-renovation project -- how to insulate your house using popcorn. Now, all the vents near the exterior walls have been hooked up exactly like this. Now the furnace will blow the popcorn up through the temporary vents and into the -- [ thud ] into the -- into the wall. [ groans ] okay, so, what you want to do is to close up all the vents that are not on the outside walls. Leave one of them off so that you can pour the popcorn kernels right down into the furnace. They're supposed to be dissolved. I knew that! I knew that! I'm stupid. I'm just stupid. There. It's off. We could have just -- we could have poured it through the vent. That's fine. That's fine. No, that's fine. You want it back on? No, no, that's fine. That'll work. That's great. All right. You put -- you put the popcorn down in there. Okay, I got it now. I'm sure. No, no. No problem. No problem. Once you get the popcorn all in there, you put the vent back on, and you close her up, yeah? And you've got all the other vents closed up? Yep, all set. It's all done. That popcorn's in there for life -- or...25 to life. [ chuckles ] well, he would know. All right. And I go over to your thermostat here, and you turn her up to 90 or 100 or basically as high as she'll go. [ clicking ] [ loud popping ] [ air hissing ] all right, uh, once the popping stops, what you want to do is turn your thermostat down to something reasonable. Then you want to go up to the attic and, uh, check to make sure that the popcorn has gone to the tops of all the exterior walls. Okay. When you said, "close off all the vents," you meant the ones upstairs, didn't you? Yeah, well, you pick up the popcorn. I'll go rent us a movie. Hey, uh, that "birdman of alcatraz" is pretty funny. [ tires screech, crash ] "for sale." oh, boy. "'86 plym. Reli. "frnt-wheel drv. Back air. "cust. Uphol. A.M./f.M., cas. "bla. Heat. Mint con. Cont. Stink. Pete. Aft. 6:00." I've seen that car. P. Crap. [ laughs ] [ squish! ] well, now that we're going ahead with the "pick your own firewood" contest, we thought we should talk to our resident tycoon-to-be, winston rothschild. How you doing, winston? Hey, red. Winston, you'd be awful proud of us up at the lodge. We've finally taken that get-up-and-go business advice of yours. We've applied it to a project that's gonna make us millions. Red, do you see what I see when I look in this septic hole? Look. That's my future. And it's swirling around, and it's going right up that hose. My old man was right. I'm useless. Oh, come on, now, winston. Don't get down on yourself. I mean, it all started with that genius who invented "pick your own fruit." and then it's "pick your own vegetables," and "chop your own christmas tree," and now youse guys are chopping your own firewood. I mean, that's just gonna be the final blow -- "suck your own sewage." and then I'm gonna be out of work, walking around with a sign tacked on to some toilet plunger that says, "will suck holding tank for food." geez. I'll tell you, my draining days are numbered, and I'll die in an office job. I hate the smell of air-conditioning. Oh, now, winston, if you're right and everybody's jumping onto this sewage-draining bandwagon thing, you could hire yourself out as a consultant. Huh? Oh, you mean like... "rothschild sewage-and-septic-sucking consulting firm"? That's the one. Ooh. I like the sound of that. I thought you might. "where we know what's coming down the pipe." well, the "pick your own firewood" project was maybe not quite as successful as we had hoped. Our first customer was eager to try it, but when we phoned in to check his credit card, they told us he was a convicted murderer. We destroyed his credit card, but nobody had the nerve to ask for the ax back. So, just let me get this correct, then. So, basically you had no sale, and you've lost your ax in the bargain. [ laughing ] [ coughs ] okay. One can assume, then, that you're out of the firewood business? We're out of the "pick your own" business, harold, but the regular firewood sales are just gonna be on hold for a while until the cottagers go back to the city for the winter, at which time we'll have easy access to their woodpiles. You're gonna steal their firewood? Oh, no. It's not -- I'm not ste-- I'm not stealing. I'm log brokering. What I'm doing is I'm selling log futures, harold. What we do is we protect their wood against the ravages of winter, and then we sell it back to them in the spring. [ screeching ] well, speaking of rats. Ha ha! Meeting time, uncle red. Yeah, you go ahead. I'll be down in a little while, harold. Okay. If my wife is watching, I'll be coming straight home after the meeting, and I thought maybe we could have a romantic evening around the fire. I'm bringing a load of firewood. It is the "pick your own style," though, so maybe you could split it while I'm having a bath. And to the rest of you, thanks so much for watching. And until next time, on behalf of myself and harold and the whole gang up here at possum lodge, keep your stick on the ice. [ screeching continues ] okay. Sit down. Sit down. And then all rise. All rise. All: Quando omni flunkus, moritati. Red: Sit down. Now, fellas...